An important consideration for the architecture of a virtual data center includes the provisioning of virtual machines and other data to the proper storage such that the storage meets certain service-level agreements (SLAs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), or other service goals. For example, storage may be selected based upon capacity, performance, availability, redundancy, etc. needed for a particular application running on the virtual machine. Another important consideration includes maximizing the availability of data, virtual machines, and the services provided by virtual machines. Availability solutions are designed to improve the resiliency of local systems or entire sites. For example, disaster recovery is an availability solution for recovering all or a portion of a data center at a recovery site from replicated data. A logical storage device within a source or protected data center site may be configured for replication to a target or recovery data center site. This replication of data may also need to be configured such that it meets SLAs, RPOs, or other service goals.
Due to their separate knowledge domains, the tasks of configuring storage and replication resources are separate from the tasks for provisioning and maintaining individual virtual machines and other data in a typical enterprise. A storage administrator typically handles the former while an application owner or virtual infrastructure user handles the latter. The execution of these tasks for each application typically follows a business workflow that includes the application owner requesting storage from the storage administrator that meets specific requirements. The storage administrator uses the specific requirements to provision one or more storage devices with the corresponding capabilities. Information about the provisioned storage is given to the application owner who, in turn, provisions virtual machine(s) for the application(s) using the storage.
Replication of data is further complicated by the selection of another site to serve as a replication target and the selection and configuration of physical and virtual resources within the other site. For example, potential target sites expose the resources available and an administrator manually selects a target site and specific resources in that site to facilitate the desired replication. This manual process is complex for novice users and places more focus on the replication infrastructure than the application/data owner's requirements of availability, replication, and/or recovery. Additionally, this manual process requires a lot of specific details about the resources within the target site to be provided to the source site.